In this week’s issue… Boeheim, Steiner join Galaxy ownership – Entercom sends Zachary south – NYC FM makes its move – Towers down in Boston – Maritimes format change – Southern Tier TV pioneer dies (Subscribe now to read it all!)
By SCOTT FYBUSH
*It’s already been a busy year in central NEW YORK for Ed Levine’s Galaxy Media. The Syracuse-based radio and events company bought out its private equity investors, struck a surprise deal to sell WOUR (96.9) in Utica to Townsquare – and now it’s selling just over a fifth of the company to seven minority investors, including Syracuse University basketball coach Jim Boeheim.
Each of the investors will pay $300,000 for a 3% piece of Galaxy, reducing Levine’s ownership stake to 79%.
“I’ve been working on this for about 6 months,” Levine told NERW.
“The first person that I approached was Coach Boeheim, who I’ve had a personal and business relationship with for over 20 years.” Levine said. “I wanted this group to be made of folks with deep ties to Central New York.”
In addition to Boeheim, the investment partners include former SU basketball star Etan Thomas, sports memorabilia dealer Brandon Steiner, former GE executive Joyce Hergenhan, broadcaster Lynn Martin of LM Communications, and investment firms Leigh Baldwin & Co. and Bryson Investment Group.
Levine says he may sell as much as 6% more of Galaxy’s equity, bringing minority ownership to 27%, though control of the company will stay firmly with Levine and his wife Pam, who’ll continue to manage Galaxy.
The company has become increasingly focused on its events business, including this past weekend’s “Taste of Syracuse”; Levine says Galaxy’s new Charlotte office will stage ten events in the Carolinas over the next year.
And if you don’t have your Tower Site Calendar, now’s the time!
If you’ve been waiting for the price to come down, it’s now 30 percent off!
This year’s cover is a beauty — the 100,000-watt transmitter of the Voice Of America in Marathon, right in the heart of the Florida Keys. Both the towers and the landscape are gorgeous.
And did you see? Tower Site of the Week is back, featuring this VOA site as it faces an uncertain future.
Other months feature some of our favorite images from years past, including some Canadian stations and several stations celebrating their centennials (buy the calendar to find out which ones!).
We still have a few of our own calendars left – as well as a handful of Radio Historian Calendars – and we are still shipping regularly.
The proceeds from the calendar help sustain the reporting that we do on the broadcast industry here at Fybush Media, so your purchases matter a lot to us here – and if that matters to you, now’s the time to show that support with an order of the Tower Site Calendar. (And we have the Broadcast Historian’s Calendar for 2025, too. Why not order both?)
Visit the Fybush Media Store and place your order now for the new calendar, get a great discount on previous calendars, and check out our selection of books and videos, too!
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*An hour to the south in Binghamton, the broadcast community is mourning the death of Gino Ricciardelli, the dean of the city’s engineers and one of the few people whose career spanned the start of television itself all the way through to the DTV conversion.
A World War II veteran, Ricciardelli came back to Binghamton after the war to work at WNBF radio – and to find himself charged with learning how to build the market’s first TV station, WNBF-TV (Channel 12), where he turned on the transmitter for the debut of Binghamton TV in 1949. After two more years at WNBF, he went on to work for WQAN in Scranton, consulted with RCA on the first megawatt UHF station, WHUM-TV in Reading, then returned to Binghamton in 1957 to build the second station in the market, WINR-TV (Channel 40), followed by its first educational outlet, WSKG-TV (Channel 46).
Ricciardelli’s colorful career went on to include many decades with channel 40, now WICZ-TV, and with its parent company Stainless Broadcasting, where he remained a consultant well into the 21st century. Along the way, he was honored in every imaginable way, including being named a fellow of the Society of Broadcast Engineers in 2014 (above left) and receiving a “living legend award” at the 2007 Binghamton Broadcasters Reunion.
Last July, Ricciardelli gathered with his fellow engineers one last time for a 95th birthday party at the Bundy Museum, where he was once again honored for his long service to the community. He died Friday (June 1) in Binghamton, and we’ll have more details on his passing and memorial plans as they become available.
*Moving down the road to New York City, Pacifica’s WBAI (99.5) swapped transmitter sites last week, leaving behind the Empire State Building after 51 troubled years for what it hopes will be a happier new home a few blocks away at Four Times Square.
As we told you in NERW in April, Empire’s owner, the Empire State Realty Trust (ESRT), reached a deal to settle WBAI’s back rent of more than $1.8 million and to end the station’s contract early. With the help of the Public Media Company’s Marc Hand, Pacifica worked out a deal with the owner of Four Times Square, the Durst Organization, for a new lease that has the cost of a new transmitter and installation rolled in to the deal.
For a station that has “perpetually troubled” almost baked into its description, WBAI now gets a breather for a year or so – but not permanently. In late 2019, the payments will once again start to be due on all of Pacifica’s new debt, which means we’re all but certain to be right back here writing about the station’s attempt to stay afloat at its new home.
(As for that new home, it’s 10 kW/282m, lower in height but higher in power than the previous 4.3 kW/415m from the Empire master antenna; in theory, at least, there should be little or no change in the station’s reach.)
*There’s a new PD at Cumulus’ WPLJ (95.5), where Dave LaBrozzi fills the gap left behind when Rick Gillette left back in January. For the last 14 years, he’s called Baltimore home, programming WLIF and WWMX for CBS Radio and then Entercom; before that, LaBrozzi’s career included a VP/programming post at Clear Channel in Pittsburgh, as well as several posts in Texas.
*Back here in Rochester, Entercom honored Steve Hausmann for his 50th anniversary in broadcasting last week. The New England native and devout Red Sox fan started as a teenager at WJDA (1300 Quincy) way back in 1968, worked his way through college at Emerson with summer gigs at WHDH, and we’ve called him ours in Rochester since he started doing sports at WHEC-TV (Channel 10) back in 1987.
He’s been with what’s now the Entercom cluster since 2001 as news anchor and now co-host at WBEE (92.5) – and now he does his work from what’s been officially designated the “Steve Hausmann Newsroom.”
*And in Buffalo, we remember Paul Smith, the versatile and talented engineer whose full-time work was at Buffalo State (including engineering campus station WBNY 91.3), but who was also a fixture elsewhere in the market, working audio for the Sabres and Bills and doing engineering for Dick Greene at WECK and WLVL.
Smith took ill on May 11 in his office at the college and underwent two surgeries for what turned out to be a ruptured aorta; sadly, he didn’t recover, dying May 30 at just 62 years old.
*There’s a tower site missing in MASSACHUSETTS, where crews quietly took down the four towers on Waverley Oaks Road in Waltham that were home to WMEX (1510) and its predecessors from 1981 until the station went dark almost a year ago.
The station never owned the site (shown here in a photo from Mike Fitzpatrick’s NECRAT.us), and the lease terms for the towers and transmitter building were widely thought to have been among the biggest reasons why the station’s succession of owners had a hard time turning a profit in its last few decades. The latest owner, Ed Perry, bought the license last year with an understanding that he wouldn’t have access to the Waltham site; with just under a month to go to return WMEX to the air, he’s working on building a 1 kW daytime facility under Special Temporary Authority at the WBIX (1260) site in Quincy, not far from the old location WMEX left behind when it moved to Waltham as WITS back in 1981.
*Over at NBC Boston, Ben Dobson is the new news director, moving up from NBC sister station WVIT in Hartford. Dobson will also oversee Telemundo’s WNEU and New England Cable News; he worked for NECN before becoming WVIT news director in 2016.
In western Massachusetts, Saga launched a new “metro signal” on Saturday, flipping translator W245BK (96.9 Amherst) from a simulcast of talker WHMP (1400 Northampton) to “Pure Oldies 96.9,” fed by an HD subchannel of WLZX (99.3 Northampton). The WHMP talk format will stay on FM, via a new Saga translator, W268CZ (101.5 Northampton).
And over at WGBY (Channel 57), they’re mourning Jim Madigan, who was a public affairs host at the Springfield public broadcaster from 1990 until lung disease forced his retirement last year. Madigan had worked in New York State, at the old WLDM (1570) in Westfield and spent eight years at WGGB (Channel 40) before joining WGBY, where he hosted “Connecting Point” and “The State We’re In.” Madigan, who died the weekend of May 26, was 65.
*Just down the road in CONNECTICUT, Phil Zachary is packing up his office at Entercom’s Hartford cluster as he prepares for his new job, replacing Steve Swenson as market manager at Entercom in Washington, D.C. Zachary was bumped to Hartford last fall when Entercom kept CBS Radio’s Mark Hannon on board to oversee its merged Boston cluster; he’ll continue to oversee Hartford and the WEEI offshoots in Springfield and Providence until Entercom finds a replacement there. (Swenson, meanwhile, had been in Washington since 2011, when he moved south from a long career in news radio in New York City at WINS and WCBS.)
Before leaving Hartford, Zachary had some staff shuffling to do at WTIC (1080 Hartford), where the end of UConn Huskies basketball and football rights also means the end of Bob Joyce’s 26 years with the station. It appears Joyce will be following the rights over to iHeart’s WUCS (97.9), while his play-by-play partner on UConn women’s basketball, Joe D’Ambrosio, moves to a new role as morning sports anchor on WTIC, which means he won’t be continuing with the Huskies in their new home. D’Ambrosio had been part of the WTIC afternoon sports-talk show with Andy Gresh until last year, when the show was cancelled and replaced with former Boston talker Todd Feinberg.
And we note with sadness the passing of Joe Bilotta, who spent more than 45 years with the former Buckley Radio group in Hartford and beyond. Bilotta worked closely with the late Rick Buckley to grow the company from its base at WDRC in Hartford to outposts in California and, in its most ambitious expansion, the 1985 purchase of New York’s WOR. Bilotta became the company’s COO in 2001 and then president/CEO a decade later, upon Buckley’s death. In his last few years with the company, he oversaw the sale of its properties, sending WOR to iHeart and the Connecticut stations to Connoisseur. Bilotta died on Friday; details of a memorial haven’t yet been announced.
*In central VERMONT, Sugar River’s WCVR (1320 Randolph) has a new translator – W261DJ (100.1) – and a new morning man. Mike Fitts started in late May on “Mike in the Morning” on the station now known as “North Country 1320 and 100.1.”
*In PENNSYLVANIA‘s Lehigh Valley, four TV stations are making history with their new channel-share. RF channel 9, once the sole province of religious WBPH (Channel 60) in Bethlehem, is now being shared with commercial independent WFMZ (Channel 69) and public broadcaster WLVT (Channel 39), which in turn picked up the “zombie license” of the former WYBE (Channel 35, now WPPT) after that Philadelphia-based station sold its spectrum last year.
From what we’re hearing, the channel-share includes three 720p HD services, the main channels of WLVT, WBPH and WFMZ, plus seven 480i standard-definition channels from WPPT (35.1/35.2 with MHz WorldView and World), WLVT (39.2/39.3 with Create and France 24), WBPH (60.2 with Worship Network) and WFMZ (69.2/69.3 with AccuWeather and an information page for viewers) – though we’re also hearing that those WFMZ subchannels may be shifting over to sister station KJWP (Channel 2) from the Roxborough antenna farm in Philadelphia.
The next step in the process will come July 18, when WLVT and WFMZ shut down their separate RF channels, on 39 and 46 respectively.
*Philadelphia is one of several markets where Radio Disney had been quietly airing on HD Radio subchannels for the last few years, as part of an arrangement between Radio Disney and the HD Radio Alliance partners. That deal appears to have ended, at least where Entercom is concerned; the Radio Disney feeds disappeared last week from WXTU (92.5) in Philadelphia as well as WBMP (92.3) in New York and other Entercom stations in Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Denver and Los Angeles.
*And on the other side of the state, we wish a very happy 70th birthday to WBVP (1230 Beaver Falls). PBRTV.com reports 230 people attended a gala event May 25 that included an appearance by Alan Boal, the last surviving member of WBVP’s original 1948 airstaff, as well as the debut of a new book, Behind The Microphone, The History of Radio in Beaver County, written by station owner Mark Peterson, Kenneth Britten, and David Felts.
*Our news from CANADA starts near the MAINE border in St. Stephen, New Brunswick, where Acadia Broadcasting let out “The Tide” at CHTD (98.1) last week. The country format had been on the station since it first signed on back in May 2001, but it’s now given way to AC as “98.1 Charlotte FM,” an identity drawn from Charlotte County, which encompasses St. Stephen.
*In Montreal, community station CHAA (103.3 Longueuil) is on its way from the tower at Olympic Stadium over to a new transmitter home on the CBC tower at Mount Royal. The CRTC approved CHAA’s application to go from its present facility (340 watts average/1.4 kW max DA/193 m) to 403 watts average/1.7 kW max DA/285 m, which will more than double CHAA’s population reach in metro Montreal. CHAA had initially faced opposition from native station CKRK (103.7 Kahnawake) to the south, which had been concerned that a CHAA upgrade would impede its own ability to get a signal boost, but CHAA agreed not to oppose any upgrade attempt by CKRK down the road.
Over at Bell’s CJAD (800), Steve Faguy reports that Joey Elias has ended his “Comedy Show,” which had aired weeknights at 11 for a decade. For now, CJAD is instead carrying simulcasts of sister station CFCF-TV (Channel 12)’s CTV national and local news in that slot.
*In Toronto, CILQ (Q107) said goodbye to weekend staple “Psychedelic Sunday” at the end of May. Andy Frost started the show way back in 1985, when the Zeppelin and Floyd tracks he played were still relatively fresh; he’s now 62, and he says the show’s ratings were still strong and he’s not sure why Corus decided to pull the plug on the Sunday afternoon staple.
Over at CITY-TV (Channel 57), it was a 27-year run for Kevin Frankish as host of “Breakfast Television” – and it wrapped up Friday, a few days after Frankish surprised Toronto viewers with news that he was doing his last week of morning shows. Frankish, 54, says he’ll stay with CityTV to produce documentaries.
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From the NERW ArchivesYup, we’ve been doing this a long time now, and so we’re digging back into the vaults for a look at what NERW was covering one, five, ten, fifteen and twenty years ago this week, or thereabouts. Note that the column appeared on an erratic schedule in its earliest years as “New England Radio Watch,” and didn’t go to a regular weekly schedule until 1997. One Year Ago: June 5, 2017 *When some groups come into new markets, they’ll immediately put out a statement that says “we don’t anticipate making any immediate changes.” PENNSYLVANIA‘s Seven Mountains doesn’t make those statements – and with good reason, as their moves last week along the I-80 corridor around DuBois made perfectly clear. Last fall, Seven Mountains put down $4.5 million to buy four FMs and an AM from First Media, just a few months after paying Cary Simpson $400,000 for two FMs and an AM up in the Wellsboro/Mansfield market. Now the company, led by second-generation broadcaster Kristin Cantrell, has pulled the trigger on big shuffles in both markets, and here’s how it plays out: On Tuesday, our suspicion that country WOWQ (102.1 DuBois) would become another Seven Mountains “Bigfoot Country” outlet came true, but with a twist: WOWQ takes new calls WIFT, and it picks up a simulcast to the west in the form of the former WZDD (101.3 Strattanville), which is now WKFT, extending “Bigfoot” into the Clarion/Brookville area with a stronger signal.
Up north in Wellsboro, Seven Mountains made one move in late May, when WNBT-FM (104.5 Wellsboro) dropped its sleepy AC format for another “Bigfoot,” and it telegraphed two others with call changes earlier on that bore fruit with a Friday format shift. That’s when WOGA (92.3 Mansfield) dumped its longtime WNBT-FM simulcast, going classic hits as “WOGA in Tioga.”
For Seven Mountains, the addition of the Wellsboro and DuBois signals extends a reach that’s already very significant in the mountains of central Pennsylvania, where two other “Bigfoot” simulcast groups serve the Susquehanna Valley and the Huntingdon/Mount Union area, augmenting a big Seven Mountains cluster in State College. Five Years Ago: June 3, 2013 *CANADA‘s public broadcaster has long had a challenging relationship with commercials. What we now know as the CBC grew out of openly commercial predecessors, the old Canadian National Railways network and the subsequent CRBC – and even after becoming a government service in the 1930s, CBC continued to carry commercial programming on its French and English radio services right up until 1974, when those networks finally went fully non-commercial. CBC Television and its French-language counterpart, Radio-Canada, have continued to carry commercials ever since. And now CBC’s Radio 2 network and Radio Canada’s Espace Musique service will once again be carrying their own commercial load, thanks to a decision in last week’s CRTC renewal of the CBC’s licenses.
The CRTC is playing its decision as an experiment: it’s giving the CBC three years to see how a limited advertising load on Radio 2 and Espace Musique will work, with some tight restrictions. Each network will be allowed to run no more than four minutes of national advertising each hour, with no more than two minutes of spots at a time; no local ads will be allowed – and in 2016, the CRTC will revisit the issue to see how it’s worked and decide whether the CBC can continue running ads. *Along the US 6 corridor in north central Pennsylvania, it’s the end of an era in the small town of Kane, which is now without a local commercial radio station for the first time in almost 60 years. WADP (960) signed on in Kane in 1954, back when the borough’s population topped 6,000, and while the AM station (later WKZA and WQLE) left the air two decades ago, it was succeeded by an FM competitor on 103.9 known at first in the 1980s as WRXZ and then WIFI, and later on as WLMI. Former Boston broadcaster Chuck Crouse owned the station through much of the 1990s, selling it in 2006 to Olean-based Colonial Radio Group – and after going through several formats and calls over several years, Kane’s 103.9, now known as WBYB, went silent for the last time last week, with a Colonial memo citing “the continuing dismal economic conditions” in the Kane area, which now has barely half the population it did in the 1950s. Unlike the old AM 960 facility, which simply went dark, the 103.9 license will stay alive at a new home. It’s moving to a new city of license of Eldred, with a new 1.2 kW/737′ class A signal on the same tower east of Smethport that’s home to Colonial’s WXMT (106.3 Smethport) and competitor WHKS (94.9 Port Allegany). It appears that once the 103.9 Eldred signal signs on in a few weeks, it will be carrying Colonial’s “Big Bob Country,” which had been on 103.9 in Kane before it began simulcasting news-talk WVTT (96.7) from Olean and which has lived on through HD-subchannel-fed translators. (Ironically, that 96.7 signal, now licensed to Portville, N.Y., was another Colonial move-in from a smaller Pennsylvania town, having moved from Coudersport a few years back.) Ten Years Ago: June 2, 2008 *It was just five years ago this summer that Access.1 Communications spent $22 million to buy the former Howard Green stations in the Atlantic City, NEW JERSEY market – NBC affiliate WMGM-TV (Channel 40 Wildwood), plus two FM and three AM stations. Two years later, Access.1 added another FM to the cluster, paying $5 million for modern rock WJSE (102.7 Petersburg). And now Access.1 is selling most of its Atlantic City radio cluster, putting the signals – WJSE, classic rock WMGM (103.7 Atlantic City), oldies WTKU (98.3 Ocean City), news/talk WOND (1400 Pleasantville) and progressive talk WTAA (1490 Pleasantville) – in the hands of a new group called “Atlantic Broadcasting.”
The purchase price hasn’t been announced, but we hear that Atlantic is getting the stations, plus the studio building in Linwood and two transmitter sites, for considerably less than Access.1 paid for the stations back in 2003. *In western PENNSYLVANIA, it didn’t take long for ESPN management to pull the plug on WEAE (1250 Pittsburgh) afternoon host Mark Madden, once the headlines about his controversial Ted Kennedy comments started spreading. Madden was off the air last Monday, and by Tuesday the word came down from Bristol that ESPN was exercising its “contractual rights” to remove Madden from the air. The move comes at perhaps the worst possible time for the station, what with the hometown Penguins in the Stanley Cup finals and all, and WEAE is trying to make the best of it with a rotating cast of fill-in hosts until a permanent replacement for the high-profile Madden can be named. *One of Atlantic CANADA‘s oldest AM stations made an abrupt disappearance from the dial late last week, as CTV wasted no time moving CJCH (920 Halifax) to its new home on the FM band.
The new FM signal isn’t picking up the AM station’s oldies format, either. Instead, it’s doing top 40 as “101.3 the Bounce.” Out as part of the transition is 30-year station veteran Rick Howe, who’d hosted the “Hotline” talk show that was heard in middays on CJCH(AM). *It’s the end of the line for NEW HAMPSHIRE‘s WMEX (106.5 Farmington); with the sale of the station to EMF Broadcasting, its current oldies format goes away at 10:00 this morning, to be replaced right away by satellite-fed “K-Love” contemporary Christian. Program director/morning man Gary James is taking WMEX out with a bang, filling the last weekend with deep-cut oldies and original PAMS jingles; the station also held a free “Last Dance” party for listeners on Saturday night. The new calls on 106.5 once K-Love takes over will be WKHL, an ID last heard down in Stamford, Connecticut on what’s now WCTZ. (Useless trivia, NERW-style: that Stamford station was once WQQQ, a set of calls now in the hands of Dennis Jackson, who’s selling WMEX to EMF.) Fifteen Years Ago: June 3, 2003 The radio scene in western MASSACHUSETTS took another step toward consolidation late last week, when Vox Media, which bought WBEC (1420/105.5 Pittsfield) last year for $4.3 million, turned that pair into a cluster. Vox will pay about $3 million to buy WUHN (1110) and WUPE (95.9) from Philip Weiner, who has owned a piece of the stations since 1977 and has owned them outright for the last 15 years. The “Party”‘s over on 890 in Boston; Mega pulled the plug on Air Time Media’s LMA of WBPS (890 Dedham) last Thursday night (5/29) at 6, flipping the calls to WAMG and the format to Spanish tropical “Mega.” Sound familiar? The calls and format move down from 1150 Boston, which Mega is selling to Salem. 1150 picks up the WBPS calls for now, as it continues to simulcast “Mega” until the sale closes – but expect yet another call change there soon, cementing 1150’s hold on the “most callsigns in Boston radio history” title. (NERW counts nine different ones: WCOP, WACQ, WHUE, WSNY, WMEX, WROR, WNFT, WAMG and now WBPS!) Plenty doing in CANADA this past week (after all, it wasn’t a holiday there) – and most of the action was in the nation’s capital, where CHUM Group pulled the plug on CHR “Kool 93-dot-9” CKKL (93.9 Ottawa) at 9:39 AM on Friday. In its place, starting at noon, is “Bob,” a classic hits/hot AC mix that describes itself as “80s, 90s and Whatever,” with a format and nickname borrowed from CHUM’s CFWM (99.9) out in Winnipeg. The station is running jockless for a week, but most of the Kool airstaff is expected to be back when the station goes live again later in June. Twenty Years Ago: June 4, 1998 The tornadoes that ripped across upstate NEW YORK on Sunday claimed two broadcast towers in Binghamton. The 500-foot guyed tower of WIVT-TV (Channel 34) came down in the storm while the ABC affiliate’s two master-control operators hid under the board for safety. When they came out, they found the station’s studio/transmitter facility in shambles (it was later condemned), and their cars in the parking lot destroyed. WIVT has not been on the air since the tower fell, as best NERW can determine. Just up Ingraham Hill Road, one of the self-supporting towers of WNBF (1290) was toppled as well. WNBF is operating on the rest of its night array under special temporary authority. Elsewhere in the region, the storm silenced several Rochester and Albany area stations briefly, including WDCZ (990) in Rochester and WPYX (106.5), among others, in Albany. The long saga of New Haven’s WNHC (1340) is over for now, and the Yale Broadcasting Company’s WYBC (94.3) is the winner. On Wednesday, YBC and Buckley Broadcasting, the owner of WDRC in Hartford, faced off in federal bankruptcy court over WNHC’s assets. When it was all over, YBC raised its initial bid by more than $100,000, to pay $775,000 for the 1000-watt station. The bankruptcy judge ordered WNHC owner Edie Rozier to sign the station’s current urban fornat off the air, which she did at 10:20 Thursday morning, saying closing the station was “like losing two families” – one at the station, and the other in New Haven’s black community. WYBC isn’t saying much about its plans for 1340, except that when it returns to the air, it will be from YBC’s 165 Elm Street facility instead of WNHC’s old Whalley Street studios. We’ll keep you posted as YBC gets its AM facility up and running. |
In this week’s issue… After NAB, hope and confusion - WZLX, WBEB relaunch morning shows - WJTO, WLAM stay alive for now - MBC takes over Bell stations - Remembering Mimi Griswold, Herb Squire By SCOTT FYBUSH Jump to: ME...
In this week’s issue… Fear and Uncertainty in Las Vegas - Memory Stations to sign off - WNED, WBFO rebrand - Najman out at WDEV - Zoomer expands in Ontario By SCOTT FYBUSH Jump to: ME - NH - VT...
A visit to many of the sites in Pennsylvania's Poconos, plus Bold Gold's stations in Scranton
In this week’s issue… Remembering Pittsburgh's Quinn - Seven Mountains enters Harrisburg - My launches new brands - Ryan out at B101 - More cuts at Radio Vermont - Another AM deleted
The new owners are local, led by president Brett DeNafo, programmer Paul Kelly (currently at WAYV, though today will be his last day there), engineer Michael Ferriola and promotions director Joseph Borsello, and they say they have a “well thought out and innovative game plan to bring the stations back to the high ratings and revenue level they once achieved.” The cluster’s current GM, Dick Irland, and sales director, Mike Kazala, will stay on board.
After less than a week of testing, CJCH-FM (101.3 Halifax) signed on for real Friday morning (May 30) at 10 AM, with none of the usual FM/AM transitional simulcasting that’s common in Canadian FM-to-AM moves. Instead, the 25 kW AM signal went to a “move to FM” loop for a few hours, then went silent for good.
